A day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a $250,000 Roadster billed as the fastest car ever on the market and a futuristic, zero-emissions big rig at Hawthorne airport, Wal-Mart signed up for at least 15 of the trucks.

But others weren’t as impressed.

Critics rushed Friday to point out the company’s pattern of missing its own delivery deadlines, and Musk’s penchant for hyperbole and theatrical presentations. (For example, he said the electric big rig, simply named Semi, “will blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension.”)

“Elon’s showmanship remains intact, even as his customers’ patience for Model 3 delivery wanes,” Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, said of Tesla’s entry-level sedan now in production.

“The specs on the new semi truck and sports car would put both vehicles at the top of their segments — assuming they can be produced and sold as part of a sustainable business plan. So far that final element has eluded Tesla Motors, which makes it difficult to see these vehicles as more than ‘what if’ concept cars.”

One thing is clear: Customer deposits on the new vehicles will blunt the company’s ongoing losses.

During Tesla’s most recent earnings report, Musk acknowledged that production of Tesla’s low-cost Model 3 had been delayed three months, and that the company had suffered a $619 million quarterly loss. The Model S sedan and Model X SUV also were plagued by delays.

What’s more, Tesla is fighting three lawsuits brought by former workers who allege the company allowed racist behavior at work.

Nonetheless, there was no uncertainty in Musk’s carefully produced presentation Thursday night, adjacent to the Hawthorne Municipal Airport runway at the site of aviation pioneer Jack Northrop’s former headquarters.

He took the stage facing hundreds of invited guests inside a cavernous hangar, next to two Tesla Semi trucks painted shiny silver and matte gray, displaying sleek LED lights and sharply angled faces.

Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s new electric semi truck at the design studio in Hawthorne. Thursday evening in an invite only event. Credit Tesla

The fully electric trucks “are designed like a bullet,” Musk said. They can go zero to 60 in five seconds (or 20 seconds if fully loaded), climb a steep hill at 65 mph, and carefully pull off the road to call for help if the driver’s hands leave the wheel, he said.

The driver’s seat is in the center like a race car, and there are two touch-screen displays.

“It’s not like any truck that you’ve ever driven,” said Musk, wearing dark jeans, a black T-shirt and olive-colored jacket. “We are guaranteeing this truck will not break down for a million miles because it has four independent motors. Even if you only have two motors active, it’ll still beat a diesel trucks.”

Musk’s announcements, livestreamed on Tesla’s website, were greeted with enthusiastic cheers and applause. At one point, a man shouted “Elon for president” while the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder spoke.

“That’s the most miserable job,” Musk replied.

The truck can go 500 miles on a single charge, or nearly twice as far as other zero-emissions heavy-duty trucks. And it rides as smooth as a Model S sedan, with a low center of gravity and a drag coefficient of .36, he said.

The brake pads regenerate and never need to be replaced, there’s no transmission to maintain, and the windshield won’t ever crack because it’s made of “thermo-nuclear explosion-proof glass,” Musk said, adding: “It survives a nuclear explosion or you get a full refund.”

The Semi’s cost? He didn’t disclose a sticker price.

“A diesel truck would be 20 percent more expensive than a Tesla semi per mile,” Musk said. “From Day One, a Tesla Semi will beat a diesel truck. We’re guaranteeing a 7 cent kilowatt wholesale price.”

The truck also “beats rail” in its efficiency and affordability, he said.

Orders are now being taken with $5,000 deposits, though production won’t begin for two years.

Production on the $250,000 four-door, convertible Roadster will begin in 2020. It’s the fastest production car ever made, he said, reaching 60 mph in less than 2 seconds.

It can travel up to 620 miles, or nearly round-trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, on one charge, and reach speeds beyond 250 mph.

“The point of doing this is to just give a hardcore smack-down to gasoline cars,” Musk said. “Driving a gasoline sports-car is going to feel like a steam engine with a side of quiche.”

Kelley Blue Book analyst Rebecca Lindland described the Roadster as “fabulous” and Musk’s ambition “admirable.”

“But,” Lindland said, “as a Model 3 depositor looking at an 18-month wait, I do wish he was a little bit further along in the delivery process before embarking on yet another new vehicle, let alone a semi truck.”

A thousand “Founders Series” Roadsters can be reserved for the full $250,000 price, bringing in a nice influx of cash.

“This is a funding strategy,” said CFRA investment-research analyst Efraim Levy, noting that the 1,000 Founders Series cars alone would bring in $250 million in prepayments, with every standard Roadster order adding $50,000.

The standard Roadster requires $5,000 down, then $45,000 within 10 days, plus another $150,000 upon delivery.

Still, Levy said, Musk’s projects have been “brilliant and disruptive in so many industries,” and he considered the new Semi an “impressive and well-thought-out likely disruptor to trucking.”

The truck is the latest addition to clean-energy trucking technologies being considered for use at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which are the single largest stationary source of air pollution in Southern California.

In addition to California’s self-imposed mandate of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, officials at the ports vowed earlier this month to transition to all zero-emissions transport and cargo-handling equipment by 2035.

But since there are no affordable zero-emissions trucks on the market, air-quality regulators are now working to transition port-based diesel fleets to low-emissions trucks that burn methane gas.

It was tested with progressively heavy loads of cargo for several months, and started real-world work in late October hauling loads from the ports to nearby rail yards. Such short hauls are expected to be the first to use zero-emissions technology at the ports,

Musk has called fuel-cell technology “incredibly dumb,” but Toyota has invested heavily in it for decades.

Another zero-emissions, short-haul technology called eHighway is now being tested on Alameda Street in Carson, across from Andeavor’s neighboring oil refineries and Kinder Morgan’s oil-storage tank yard. It transports electric and hybrid-electric trucks via overhead wires like a trolley.

Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Costa Samaras, who studies electric vehicles, called the possibility that Tesla could shake up the trucking business “exciting,” but noted the firm’s challenges with getting vehicles to customers. “If it stays a concept car until 2030, then we have a problem,” Samaras said.

Trucking produces a quarter of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, Samaras said. “If we can take that quarter and cut it in half with an all-electric fleet, that’s big news,” Samaras said.

Two corporate giants quickly gave Tesla votes of confidence, with trucking behemoth J.B. Hunt pre-ordering “multiple” semis and retail titan Wal-Mart preordering 15 — five for the U.S. and 10 for Canada.

“We have a long history of testing new technology — including alternative-fuel trucks — and we are excited to be among the first to pilot this new heavy-duty electric vehicle,” Wal-Mart spokesman Ryan Curell said Friday.

“We believe we can learn how this technology performs within our supply chain, as well as how it could help us meet some of our long-term sustainability goals, such as lowering emissions.”

J.B. Hunt said it believed electric trucks with “this new, sustainable technology” will be most useful for short-haul trips.

Carnegie Mellon’s Samaras said the fact that people across the country were glued to Tesla’s livestreamed event Thursday night “said something really special about this moment in technology.”

“We need lots of Tesla-type companies in the transportation space,” Samaras said, “if we’re going to make big improvements in the energy and environmental performance of the transportation sector.”

Sandy Mazza is a freelancer. She previously worked for Southern California News Group as a city reporter covering Carson and Hawthorne and specializing in features about Los Angeles' growing Silicon Beach tech, bioscience, and aerospace sectors.